This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Allen White (@SQLRunr) and is about sharing your T-SQL tips and tricks. Since I know many people will share their T-SQL magic and wizardry, I thought I would share a couple of productivity tips - so still T-SQL related, but more how to take advantage of some features in SSMS.
Drag column list onto ...

Where is my graphical ShowPlan?
Many of you on SQL Server 2008 R2 are experiencing a major annoyance with SSMS since installing service pack 1 - when clicking a plan from grid results, you get raw XML instead of the graphical plan. I wrote about this symptom and a workaround in a previous post. In the original Connect item, they state that it ...

For those of you using the SQL Server 2008 R2 version of Management Studio, and have applied Service Pack 1, you have probably noticed that clicking on a ShowPlan in grid results no longer shows the graphical plan, but rather opens a new window with the raw XML.
For example, running the following query:
SELECT TOP (5) ...

On Friday, we published a new version of our free query plan analysis tool, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. As noted in the change list, we've added a couple of important features.
SQL Server 2012 support
With a whole slew of changes to the showplan schema in Denali, we've added operators and columns to reflect these changes. For example, you will ...

UPDATE 2016-10-07 - This demo kit has been overhauled:
https://blogs.sentryone.com/aaronbertrand/plan-explorer-3-0-demo-kit/
Plan Explorer is a free application from SQL Sentry, designed
to make execution plan analysis faster and easier. It was developed in response
to customer demand for ...

This question came up on twitter, and I thought a quick blog post would be better than a series of 140-character snippets. Management Studio does not do the best job at highlighting missing indexes. If you have a simple query plan that represents a single statement, no problem; however, if you have a plan that represents a multi-batch statement, ...

SQL Server 2008 introduced a new feature that had the potential to be very useful, the ability to color colour-code a query window in SSMS to represent the server that was being connected to. This was configured using the properties of a server in the Registered Servers pane: Unfortunately this feature was made less than useful, dangerous ...

This week I reported a few bugs - one with sp_helptext, one with Activity Monitor in Management Studio, and one in the new sys.dm_server_services DMV.#683234 : sp_helptext treats non-system objects as system objects For this one there is at least one weird case where running sp_helptext against on object prefixed with dbo ignores the dbo and tries ...

Ctrl+R is a good friend of mine - we go way back. It is very handy to use this command not only to hide the results pane away and focus on the query at hand, but to also be able to bring the results back just as quickly - without having to run the query again, or mess with click + drag nonsense.
In Denali, we get a new version of SSMS, tightly ...

I have been on a SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (aka PDW) training course this week and was interested to learn that you can't (yet) use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) against PDW, instead they ship a 3rd party tool called Nexus Chameleon. This was a bit of a disappointment at the beginning of the week (I'd prefer parity across SQL Server ...